As the title The Problem of Political Authority suggests, a central issue in political
philosophy is the nature and justification of the authority of the state. States claim to
have authority, and this authority is simultaneously the basis for the individuals duty
to obey the state and, should we be remiss in this duty, the states right to coerce. But
where does this authority come from? Long ago, one might have grounded the
authority of the stateor more precisely, the monarchin raw power or the divine
will. Few today would defend the notion that we all by nature owe allegiance to a
divinely appointed sovereign, whose power is an expression of Gods law. Modern
alternatives that many people do take seriously include the idea that a democratic state
gets its authority from the whole of the people and the idea that we can hypothetically
be presumed to consent to authority as an expression of the social contract. What if
these arguments dont work? One possibility is that states actually dont have the
authority they claim. In that case, the only justification for state coercion would be
that the social order itself is impossible otherwise.

Michael Huemer argues in his new book that indeed the modern arguments for
political authority fail and, furthermore, that society will work just fine without state
coercion. Hence, there is no duty on persons to obey the law and no right of the
state to coerce. Huemer thus joins the ranks of twenty-first-century philosophical
defenders of an anarchist position that is rooted in a conception of the efficacy
of voluntary and competitive institutions (see, for example, Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy [London: Continuum Books, 2012]; Gary Chartier, Anarchy and Legal
Order [Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013]; and Aeon J. Skoble,
Deleting the State [Chicago: Open Court, 2008]). He argues that if we begin from
commonly held and relatively uncontroversial moral claims, we will arrive at his
uncommon and controversial conclusion. He announces early on that his argument
is not based on a comprehensive moral or political theory such as utilitarianism or
Kantian deontology or Rawlsian social contract theory. According to Huemer, One
who hopes to make progress [in political philosophy] cannot begin from a contentious
moral theory, still less from a contentious political ideology (p. 15). This
puts him in the interesting, and in my view correct, position that although most
peoples widely shared moral beliefs are correct (stealing and killing are bad; keep
your promises), most peoples widely shared political beliefs are mistaken (laws have
authority because they are laws; some states are legitimate).

Huemer devotes the first part of the book to the question of whether government
is justifiedor, more precisely, whether government can have special rights that
ordinary persons lack or whether persons have special duties to government that they
do not have to others. The second part of the book is concerned with the consequences
of recognizing that the answer to the first question is nowhether society
can actually function without government. To argue against the justification for
authority, Huemer shows how several common strategies fail: social contract theory,
democratic theory, consequentialism, and fairness. Each in turn is shown to appeal to
some aspect of our moral intuitions, but then to overlook some equally important
facet of those intuitions. For example, he argues that we cannot derive a theory of
political obligation from majority-rule democracy. Democratic sensibilities will produce
a need to respect other peoples judgments, but not a right of majorities to
impose their judgments on unwilling persons by force. The inference from the former
to the latter, Huemer argues, is a sleight of hand: deliberating, for example, cant by
itself be a rationale for negating prima facie rights. Treating others as equals cant by
itself be a rationale for majorities coercing minorities. Indeed, one might argue that
democratic respect for the equality of all persons necessarily excludes majoritarian
coercion of minorities. Similarly, Huemer shows that consequentialist or fairnessbased
arguments for coercion either prove too much or skip a step. One of the most
prevalent rationales for political obligation is social contract theory, and Huemer
shows that it too fails. He argues that the central idea of social contract theory is a
good oneour interactions should be voluntarybut that subjection to government
is obviously not voluntary (p. 35). The laws are imposed whether one has
consented or not, and there are no reasonable means for opting out. Some defenders
of the social contract approach try to work around this objection by recasting it as a
hypothetical contract: although you didnt actually consent, a rational person would consent, and so again the states right to coerce is legitimate. This recasting, Huemer
argues, does not work either. He shows that there is no good reason to think that all
would agree to any particular set of commands, even under hypothetical deliberation conditions such as those postulated by the influential philosopher John Rawls. But
even if there were, Huemer says, it still wouldnt warrant the conclusion about the
justification of coercion: the mere unreasonableness of someones rejecting an
arrangement does not typically render it morally permissible to coerce that person
into accepting the arrangement (p. 57). Here we see a representative example of
Huemers approachcommon sense and widely held moral beliefs about the wrongness
of this rationale for coercion are taken to be overridden because it is the
state doing the coercing, yet this is supposed to be a rationale for the justification
of the state. Hence, such arguments for the states authority are question begging,
in addition to having the other flaws Huemer notes.

In the second part of the book, Huemer responds to a different set of concerns.
Even if we take it as granted that the state lacks authority and is not morally justified,
if the results of not having a state were catastrophic, then we would need one anyway.
If social living were literally impossible without the state, then the anarchist argument
would be undercut. So Huemers next task is to show that society can function
perfectly well without the state. Again, he appeals to commonly held moral beliefs
that do not depend on sophisticated moral theoryfor example, popular notions that
violence, stealing, and lying are morally wrong. He then outlines how basic security
would be obtained in a free societyreaders of this journal will be familiar with the
idea of private, competing agencies that offer protective services and of disputes being
arbitrated by competitive dispute-resolution firms (see, for example, Edward
Stringham, ed., Anarchy and the Law [Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute,
2007]). Such firms depend for their viability on actual success at preventing and
resolving conflicts rather than on political patronage and the coercion that entails.
He also addresses concerns about the degree to which market institutions can serve
and protect the poor, and he shows that privatization of dispute-resolution and
protective services not only has lower costs and higher levels of service but also avoids
predictable pitfalls of government-run systems.

Theres a school of thought that argues that even if all of the above is correct,
we would still need a state to prevent foreign attack because only a state can wage war.
Huemer also takes up this concern, arguing that an anarchist society has perfectly
plausible means for collectively defending itself against invaders, but that being a
peaceful and decentralized society makes war less likely to begin with. He claims, not
implausibly, that keeping a large standing army with global reach actually makes it
more likely that the society will engage in unwarranted aggression, which is the sort
of thing that provokes reprisals.

Huemer concludes on a note of optimism: a claim that his project is not utopian
and that we can actually hope to achieve the free society. He argues that abolition of
government is actually more realistic than reforming it, on the grounds that the latter
requires people to know a lot about complicated matters, whereas the former requires
only skepticism of authority. He says the only thing standing in the way is public
opinion and inertia. Unfortunately, these obstacles are huge, and I fear that they are harder to overcome than Huemer thinks. Nevertheless, his thesis is correct: states do
not have authority and lack the right to coerce, and society can get along perfectly
well, if not better, without them. His arguments are sound and elegantly presented.
Perhaps if the book is widely read and discussed, his final prediction might have
a chance of being correct also.